Posts Tagged ‘drawing’

I was very affected by our sojourn to the Spiral Jetty on our recent southwest road trip. As much as I was taken with the life and death of Amelia Earhart, last year’s oil spill, the Icelandic volcanic eruption, and responded to these events in my recent work, I am currently working on a drawing in that loosely engages Spiral Jetty and the life and untimely death of Robert Smithson. The book Mirror-Travels | Robert Smithson and History has been informative, imparting the significance of the building site of the monumental earth work: close to the site of the driving of the Golden Spike, where the continent was joined via railroad. Also today’s Daily Serving article about the potential fate of the piece is quite timely, yet unsettling.

Here are some images of sketchbook collages I made on the trip from the vast amount of magazines we took with us for the long car rides.

So it is happily between the drawing and painting studio that I will spend the rest of the summer, amidst gardening, sun tea making, gathering with friends and planning a large international exhibition for the fall (this time with my curatorial hat on). As I see it, that’s a pretty good place to be.

Non Native, a four-person show at Butter Projects, opened Saturday night, and despite a mess of freezing rain and snow, there was a great crowd. Here are some images from the opening and the show install.

Mark & I gave my website a pretty substantial face lift, courtesy of his amazing new artist website software, Schmolio. He needs beta testers (it’s free right now! and really cheap after that) so head on over there if you’re interested in switching or starting an artist’s (or musician’s) site.

In other news, I just finished installing work at Butter Projects for their upcoming four-person exhibition Non Native. Details are below.

BUTTER projects presents the first exhibition of our 2011 season titled NON-NATIVE. The exhibit runs from March 5 – April 1, 2011 with an opening reception on March 5, 2011 from 7-10pm. Free and open to the public.

NON-NATIVE brings together a group of four Non-Michiganders who are currently living and working in the Metro-Detroit area. The exhibition highlights the role community and sense of place plays in work that addresses varying cultures, techniques, traditions and methods. Featuring works in fiber, painting, photography and sculpture.

In conjunction with the exhibit, a panel discussion with the artists of NON-NATIVE will be held on March 20 at 2pm. Guest moderators Vince Carducci and renee c. hoogland will lead the discussion regarding the unique framework of Metro-Detroit; what draws artists here, where does our location fit in the contemporary art world and how it’s played a role in the panelists work.

About Butter Projects

BUTTER projects is a studio and exhibition space founded in October of 2009. Housed in a storefront built in 1915, the space was conceived to be flexible and open to a multitude of creative endeavors. Our mission is to engage with the community and participate in the promotion of the arts in the Metro-Detroit area by providing a place to make, discuss and exhibit artwork. Butter Projects is run and operated by Alison Wong, Kelly Frank, Jacklyn Brickman and Elizabeth Boyd Hartmann.

Butter is located at 814 West Eleven Mile Road, in Royal Oak, Michigan. Parking is available behind the building. For more information visit www.butterprojects.info or contact butter.projects@gmail.com
Hours are by appointment only with the exception of special events and receptions. ###

Last Map: Mirror, Last Map: Beacon, Last Map: Crosslit, each gouache and ink on paper, 11.5″ x 8.25″, 2010

I completed 3 more Last Map drawings in Iceland to total 30, which has been my goal for some time now. These latest drawings reflect my icy surroundings at the time I made them. Hopefully I can exhibit all 30 together in the near future.

Although I prefer to display them all simply taped to the wall, the wear and tear isn’t good for the drawings, so I need to get them framed. I have some ideas for framing them that should provide for some interesting installation opportunities.

-Also, Nicole Pietrantoni (who I met and collaborated with in Iceland) and I plan to be working together again soon under the name Island Projects. We hope to have a website up and running in the near future.

-Some of Amelia Earhart’s bones may have been found on Nikumaroro Island in the Pacific Ocean. Here’s the full article.

When I arrived in Iceland, it was my plan to make some gouache paintings of small, contained worlds, like the glassy images in these two pieces: Last Map: Osolith and Last Map: Divisadero on white or blue paper. However, on my first day in my studio, I found a collage of images from the Icelandic landscape left by a previous resident. As it depicts a self-contained world, I decided to copy it in gouache, as a sort of collaboration with this unknown artist. These are just studio snapshots. I will add more professionally documented images of the piece to my website when I get home.

Here are some images from my solo exhibition We are running… at Northeastern Illinois University’s Fine Arts Center Gallery. Much of this work appeared in my recent exhibition in at Pterodactyl in Philadelphia, but the postcard installation with the bottle of ash is new. The postcards are manipulated exhibition announcements from both solo exhibitions, mounted on Scrabble tile trays. The bottle contains sea glass and volcanic ash from the base of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano that erupted in Iceland this year. Exhibition details follow the images.

Amy Sacksteder: We are running…

October 4th-October 29th

The work included in this project is derived from the last moments of Amelia Earhart’s life and is used as a springboard to examine and confront mortality. The title is an excerpt of Earhart’s last words. The work is also influenced by the artists’s June 2010 residency in Iceland.

What lies below the surface of the physical, the perceptible, and the quantifiable? Invisible forces of the subconscious simmer until they come to a head in subtle circumstances of serendipity or in violent disruption, sparring with the perceived logic of life.

Sub Terrain is an all-media exhibition that invites artists to give vision to the invisible and explore the landscape of the immaterial and its convergence with the physical realm.

Here are images from my show Our Improbable Existence at Pterodactyl in Philly. Here is more info about the show. The show was made possible by the support of the Philadelphia Art Hotel. To see individual pieces, peruse recent blog posts or visit my website. Off to the opening!

Yesterday I was inspired to finish the rest of the drawings on photos to make twelve total. All of them are either liquid gold leaf or ink on a digital photographic print. They’re either 15″ x 20″ or 20″ x 15″. Again, excuse the poor documentation. Here they be:

I’m reading…

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